Key takeaways

Just as in many aspects of our lives, mobile devices have become a crucial element to communicate in the medical field. Patients contact their physicians through telemedicine, and these keep their patients’ medical records on cloud-storage apps. Even if these technological breakthroughs already make medical attention a lot more efficient, they can also represent miscommunication issues that can be not only impractical but also risky. Here’s how:

• When doctors and patients use regular messaging apps, these are not adapted to the technical vocabulary needed. 
• For this reason, the embedded autocorrection engine tends to inappropriately change words according to their dictionary database. 
• This can lead to miscommunication issues, as patients may receive the wrong information from their doctors if they do not double-check their texts.
• Fleksy’s technology can help create a dedicated keyboard for apps specialized in secure texting for healthcare to ensure a medical dictionary is included in the autocorrection engine, reducing the chances of undesired corrections of medical terms.

Common issues and consequences of medical-terminology errors 

From less to more severe, here are some of the most common issues that wrong terminology and miscommunication can cause in the medical field.

Low efficiency and time loss

In the best of cases, doctors will double-check their messages before sending them to ensure there are no misunderstandings. However, taking the time to do this reduces the efficiency that instant messaging should bring and wastes the time of all actors involved.

Inefficient communication

Although some doctors may review for errors, many others don’t keep this in mind, or may not have the time to do so, and can send messages containing typos or undesired corrections. If the recipient of the message hopefully notices there is something wrong with it, he or she may ask for clarification. In this case, indications can be correctly explained despite the mistake, but time gets lost by having to ask and clarify instead of getting straightforward communication.

Wrong prescriptions

Unfortunately, most recipients may not realize that there is a mistake in the text they are reading. This is the worst-case scenario, in which patients may receive incorrect indications about medicine intake, or colleagues in a medical practice may get wrong information about patient treatments, for instance. 

Medical malpractice claims

After wrong prescriptions, either to the patient or colleagues, comes malpractice. The least severe case can be having an ordinary cold being insufficiently treated, but this type of mistake could even lead to wrongly practiced surgeries, with extremely negative consequences. 

Why is it important to add a medical dictionary to autocorrect?

As you have just read, there are many issues, from mild to severe, that can be caused by an error as simple as a typo or an undesired autocorrection. To avoid this, some healthcare providers have developed their own specialized apps with embedded medical dictionaries to avoid this kind of issue.

By having a system-wide medical keyboard, doctors can ensure that their devices do not misspell medical terminology and have it corrected with other more common words, or they can rely more on their autocorrection engine to avoid typos. Additionally, Fleksy’s medical keyboard can be combined with this specialized dictionary to provide accurate next-word prediction, shortening typing times considerably.

What is a medical keyboard? Tailor your healthcare settings

The functions of a medical keyboard go beyond autocorrection and next-word prediction. The most important factor is cybersecurity. Using a medical app with your device’s default keyboard can represent putting confidential information at risk, as regular keyboards do not normally fulfill HIPAA requirements for data protection.

Developing your own secure texting app for healthcare, with its own medical keyboard, means putting cybersecurity first, as Fleksy’s SDK includes all the necessary protocols to keep information safe and data management compliant. Additionally, these types of keyboards are fully customizable, ensuring that every organization can adapt them to their needs, modifying designs and layouts to expand accessibility and enhance user experience. 

Hawaii Pacific Health: A successful case

Integrating the Fleksy SDK into your app development process can help you reduce time and costs, as you won’t need to create a keyboard and all its necessary components from scratch. In addition, you will also be able to ensure cybersecurity measures are covered to protect your confidential information and your patients’.

For more information about medical keyboards, you can read about Hawaii Pacific Health, one of our success stories. With Fleksy’s medical keyboard, this non-profit organization boosted its own healthcare app by adding an embedded keyboard with a specialized dictionary of medical terminology. In a matter of days, the hospital’s Mobile Device Management (MDM) system collected and updated all 1500 devices in the organization. This seemingly small change generated an overwhelmingly positive response among healthcare providers in HPP, as it made communication faster, more efficient and safer.

Conclusion 

It is the smallest details that make the biggest difference in technological advancements. Although it may seem like a tiny change, implementing medical terminology dictionaries within specialized apps can affect the way physicians communicate with patients and colleagues. Contact us to build your own medical keyboard now!

FAQs

Is there a medical keyboard for iPhone?

Although there are a few medical keyboards for iPhone in the market, we strongly recommend medical organizations develop their own virtual keyboard for healthcare, using the Fleksy SDK. This will not only provide you with the specialized terminology dictionary, but also comply with data privacy regulations to avoid data breaches and regulatory fines.

Can you add a medical dictionary to Iphone?

The most common way to add a medical dictionary to your keyboard database is either by manually adding new words to the dictionary or waiting for it to save terms automatically as you use it. However, medical terminology is extremely extensive, and this would be a never-ending task. If you are part of a healthcare organization, our best recommendation is to develop your own keyboard using an SDK like Fleksy’s, including a medical glossary with all the necessary terms.

How does an auto-correcting medical dictionary differ from a regular spell checker or dictionary tool?

Autocorrection engines typically work based on databases and algorithms that compare your writing to their pre-saved dictionary. That means that words which are not included in the dictionary may be considered incorrect. The difference between regular and medical autocorrection is that specialized dictionaries contain medical glossaries in their database, thus being able to recognize, correct and even suggest these words when typing.